Pinterest is all about projects. From new recipes to DIY crafts, the bulletin board for your life is designed to inspire you to take on new challenges. But until now, there was no way to privately discuss those plans with your friends and family. So Pinterest introduced conversations on Wednesday, and I couldn't help but wonder: What took so long?

Congress has been pursuing an investigation into alleged misconduct at the IRS, and as a part of that investigation it requested emails from former IRS director Lois Lerner for the timeframe in question. The response Congress got was those emails--along with any archive or backups of those emails--have been erased and are no longer available. There are legal and compliance requirements organizations must abide by when it comes to retention of information, and the IRS apparently dropped the ball.

With the explosion of interest in Big Data everyone in every department is looking for actionable intelligence. That's great but there's a downside: Trying to explain to, say, your VP of sales that the sales of barbecue sauce might appear to be connected to the selling price of beef but you can't say that's true for certain and that it would be inadvisable to act on that conclusion without deeper analysis.

Facebook didn't dig too deeply to innovate on Snapchat's ephemeral messaging premise with its new iOS and Android app Slingshot, but the network's latest teen-friendly effort has a twist: Before you can read a message, you have to send one.

Email. Few things waste more time, yet few things are quite as essential to our daily lives--both personal and professional. And the only thing worse than wasting time managing your inbox is wasting time on app that's supposed to make it more efficient. But I can help: here's are a few email apps that can save you time and energy.